


blame the donkey

by Eiso



Category: Let's Play Cyberpunk Red - Polygon (Web Series)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Chronic Pain, Dapper Dasha/Burger Chainz/Vang0 Bang0, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Violence, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:01:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26470795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eiso/pseuds/Eiso
Summary: “Burger didn’t regret getting the augments, really, but he had to admit they made things a little more difficult”a.k.a 5 times Burger’s augments hindered him +1 time they helped
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	blame the donkey

**Author's Note:**

> Hey you know how Burger canonically got his jaw kicked off by a donkey? That’s pretty fucked up, isn’t it?   
> ,,,,,,,anyways chronic pain sucks and I love projecting  
> Also: the second scene was definitely not inspired by a certain cursed spinch stream I have no idea what you’re talking about

1.

Burger didn’t regret getting the augments, really, but he had to admit they made things a little more difficult when the weather ticked over from the pleasant cool of october to the genuine chill of november and the cold seeped into his bones and his fingers turned pale and he had to be sure to keep a thermos of something hot with him at all times because getting your tongue stuck to frozen metal was a whole lot funnier when it was to a flagpole for a dare rather than to your lower lip when you forgot to check whether or not it had frosted up overnight. It was better, now, than the early days, after Burger got half his face caved in -- and seriously,  _ fuck _ that donkey -- and the medical bills were through the roof and the agri-corp swooped in and he was out on the road with nothing to his name but the clothes on his back and the keys to a van, better than the following year where he fell in with what turned out to be the wrong crowd and got his knuckles replaced with brass to ensure he’d win any scuffle he got into and his eye replaced with a camera to make sure he wasn’t slacking on the job, but some days -- when Dasha was out of town so her apartment was locked, and gas money was low so there wasn’t any heat in the van overnight, and Vang0 was off somewhere so they wouldn’t huddle close to him in the night -- Burger would wake up with blue fingers and shuddering breath and end up shivering in the corner until he could shake warmth back into his limbs, and on bad days like that he’d find a diner somewhere and get as much complementary hot coffee as he could with his pancakes and daydream about kicking that  _ fucking _ donkey’s jaw in, just to prove that turnabout was fair play.

2.

The eye-cam usually came in pretty handy, Burger found, when he needed to remember a conversation or check a dark room or make sure there was no one waiting for him on the other side of a door, but it really didn’t help when it came to moderating Vang0’s streams. They were taking a break from sixnite today -- because “my viewers can only watch me die so many times before it stops being funny, Burger, and we just got seventeen subs last week, I want to break twenty before the month’s over” -- and instead playing a vintage game Vang0 had tracked down a few days ago, with bright, constantly moving colors and loud patterns and peppy music -- and the music was really good, Burger declared the instant the game loaded, he should get that for his van, it would really make longer drives more bearable -- but it sure was doing a number on the processing speed for his eye-cam.

“Hey guys, Vang0 Bang0 here, and today I will be tracking down my kidnapped children and then firing them out of a cannon at the enemy!”

Burger thought that was probably clickbait -- did it still count as clickbait if the viewer had already clicked on the stream? -- but he was more distracted by the warped and pixelated image that had taken over half his vision, and the rapid-onset migraine that accompanied it. Now, he could just switch off his eye-cam, except Vang0 liked him to record so the viewers could see their reactions first hand instead of through a mirror and they had been  _ so _ excited for this stream -- “it fits my aesthetic so well Burger, it’s like they made my dress-sense into a game, it’ll be so fun and will get us so many viewers, we have to play it!” -- so he could suck it up for a few hours and then lie down and close his eyes and maybe Vang0 would let him use them as a pillow while they browsed jumptrash and run their hands through his hair as he drifted off and really when he put it that way a little migraine wouldn’t be much of a price to pay at all, so he kept his gaze on Vang0’s face and focused on their brilliant smile and bright laugh and the way they ran their hands through their hair when it fell into their eyes and he could mostly ignore the way his vision splintered and his head pounded and the way everything sounded like he was underwater or maybe just a few feet away from his body and how everything seemed like it was on a split second delay and -- oh was the stream over already? he didn’t think it had been that long but -- Vang0 was signing off and setting the controller down and switching off the screen and looking over at him and their eyes were widening and they stood up and leaned down and cradled Burger’s face in their hands and were they saying something?

“Hey, you with me, big guy? You look a little out of it, what’s up?” Burger slurred out what he hoped was an explanation and it must have been enough because Vang0 relaxed and shoved him playfully and told him to “pay more attention next time, I kicked ass in this game it’s my new calling” and Burger’s heart dropped and he felt bile rise in his throat at the thought of another day of that technicolor hell and something must have shown on his face because Vang0 laughed and reassured him that they were “just joking, I could never betray my fans like that, and besides, I got two headshots yesterday so I think I’m improving, let’s keep a good thing going,” and dragged Burger out for a late lunch or maybe an early dinner and the lights of the city streaked and blurred to cover most of his vision but Vang0’s hand was warm in his own and he could hear the smile in Dasha’s voice when she saw them walk into the bar and maybe the music made him want to crush his head between his hands until something broke but he was with his partners and they were happy and laughing so really it was all worth it.

3.

Having a chunk of metal welded to your face would probably always feel a bit foreign, Burger thought, especially when you factored in the nerve damage and hairline fractures up his cheekbones that had never quite healed right, and anyways the end result was that sometimes he found it difficult to get his words out for more reasons than just being a bit dim and socially unskilled -- so he let the words flow unpolished and unhurried, a strong farm boy accent to disguise the way he couldn’t make his words precise the way Dasha’s sentences emerged premeditated and sure or fast-racing the way Vang0’s thoughts stumbled from their brain and tripped fully formed out of their mouth -- Burger spoke with a smile and mispronounced some words on purpose to disguise the ones he mispronounced on accident and overpronounced the most important ones like when he was telling Vang0 that he loved them and Dasha that he would follow her to the ends of the earth and when he needed to make it perfectly clear that their mark could cooperate or could finish their day off with their head through a wall, it was their choice, and he smiled and laughed and ignored the way that every time he opened his mouth the metal scraped against the remaining bone in his face and his skin pulled and threatened to tear where it was attached to his jaw and tried not to think about how sometimes when he smiled too wide he could taste blood.

4.

Precision wasn’t exactly Burger’s strong suit. He specialized in making friends and slamming things into peoples’ heads and neither of those really lent themselves to finesse, so it wasn’t that big a deal that he couldn’t pick a lock or type very fast or untie a knot, or at least, it hadn’t been until Vang0 had declared tonight a sleepover and they had brought out the movies and popcorn and -- and this was the sticking point -- the bottles of glitter nail polish, stating that 

“It’ll be just like all the old movies you like, Burger, and I even got Dasha to agree to getting her nails painted too, and we’ll do hair braiding and spin the bottle and it’ll be a great time!” Burger had questioned what exactly the point of spin the bottle was when they could kiss each other whenever they wanted but apparently it was “for the drama of it all, come on, where’s your sense of romance,” so he happily agreed and the two of them had a grand old time making their way through Winona Ryder’s imdb and swooning dramatically onto Dasha’s lap every time one of her characters came onscreen, and it wasn’t until he was holding her hand in his and struggling to not smear nail polish all over her fingers that Burger realized  _ maybe _ having half his hand replaced with black market brass knuckles could negatively affect his ability to do his girlfriend’s nails. When he fucked up for the fourth time, smearing red varnish over Dasha’s cuticles, he gave up and apologized, handing the bottle to Vang0 with the suggestion that maybe they should take over from here, he wasn’t the best with small details, and sorry for messing up your nails, Dasha, though he had to admit that having her hands coated in red was a remarkably good look on her -- it was oddly fitting, really -- but maybe she’d prefer if Vang0 made it actually look good, and then the words died in his throat as she took the bottle from Vang0 and pressed it into his hands and reassured him that “I don’t mind a little mess, Burgs, and anyways you’re right about red being a good look on me,” but he still chose to sit back and watch when it was time to paint Vang0’s nails, they were much more honest about this sort of thing and Burger really didn’t want to hear them suppressing their laughter as they told him that he’d done a shit job of it -- not that they’d mean to hurt his feelings, but tact was a foreign concept for them and the truth was that expecting him to do anything more delicate than smashing a glass over someone’s head was just asking for trouble, so he tangled knots that could generously be described as  _ somewhat resembling a braid _ into Vang0’s hair and Dasha painted their nails with a neon green that matched their jacket and it barely hurt when Vang0 undid their hair the instant their nails were dry, really.

Spin the bottle was more fun than the nail painting, and Dasha laughed when Burger accidentally dropped the first bottle, and Vang0 joked that they’d just have to drain another thing of wine -- they didn’t  _ have  _ to, but they did anyways because what else do you do when you’re grown adults at a sleepover with people you love and you’re already a little drunk and want to keep the party going -- and when Burger accidentally broke the second one with too forceful a spin he told himself it was just because he was drunk.

5.

Burger probably should have expected this job to go to shit -- it was sketchy from the beginning, the pay was suspiciously high and the details were weirdly vague -- but hindsight was 20/20 and what he wouldn’t give for perfect vision in the present because the fucker that hired them had led them into a trap and set off an EMP and now -- for one thing, Vang0 wasn’t able to hack into the servers to find out who wanted them dead, but more pressingly -- Burger was standing guard at the door with a gun, twelve bullets, and only one functioning eye. They were so fucked.

The thing was, if it was close quarters combat they were dealing with Burger could just throw a few punches, slam a few heads into the ground, and call it a day, but they were in a back room with one exit that led into a large reception hall where anyone could see them from twenty yards away, and sure, Burger could see them too but that didn’t do much good when his depth perception was shot and Dasha was trying to unscrew the air vent so she could get the drop on the assholes currently hunting them and Vang0 was frantically trying to reboot the power so Burger set his jaw and ignored the pain of wires sparking inside his brain and raised the gun to fire at the first thug to walk into his line of sight. It wasn’t his lucky day -- three people ran towards them and two of them only had rippers and a bat, respectively, but one had a shotgun and fired as soon as she spotted Burger, barely missing him when he ducked behind the doorframe. Burger informed Dasha about the current status of their situation -- namely, bad -- before darting out to fire a few shots at the goons who were now maybe ten seconds away from reaching them -- it should have been easy to hit them from what was almost point blank range but Burger wasn’t used to aiming with only one eye so the shots went wide and the shotgun lady fired again and caught him in the arm as he tried to dodge and wow that hurt but Vang0 almost had the computer back on and the faster they got out of this mess the faster Burger could get his eye-cam back so he braced himself and tackled the lady with the shotgun as soon as she was in range and only caught a bit of shot in the side before he could wrestle the gun away and turn it on the other two and fire in their general direction and take them out of the fight as the computer booted up with a chime and Dasha dropped from the ceiling and they hurried to get back to the van before more trouble arrived.

Once they were in the van and on the road away from that particular shit-show, the gunshot wounds -- somewhat understandably, they certainly looked the most pressing -- took precedent over the fact that Burger was driving half blind, which, personally he would be more concerned about their driver not currently having any depth perception, but maybe there was something he was missing, and when he expressed this particular concern Dasha overruled him with the fact that he was “currently about ten minutes from bleeding out you idiot, what, do you  _ like _ getting shot?” and Vang0 pointed out that “I can’t reboot your eye while you’re driving anyways, shut up and let us take care of you,” and neither of them really listened when Burger pointed out that he was in absolutely no danger of bleeding out, the worst he could get would be an infection or twelve, and maybe they should be more concerned about crashing, so instead he pulled over to the side of the road and Dasha got the shot out with hopefully sterilized tweezers and Vang0 fiddled with something until his eye-cam rebooted with a white-hot burst of pain and he pulled back out into traffic and they were seventeen minutes from Dasha’s apartment when Burger realized that hey,

That truck had been following them for a while and they were coming up to a red light and oh dear this might be very bad and  _ whoops  _ that was a gas canister that just burst through the back window and he had just enough time to throw his arm out to stop Vang0 from flying through the windshield as he slammed on the breaks and his newly intact vision was blurring and Burger really should have known from the beginning that this job would go to shit.

+1

It was very dark when Burger woke up, and the first thing he really registered -- beyond the fact that  _ ow _ his head hurt what had they gotten him with -- was that he, surprisingly, was  _ not  _ tied to a chair. Really, he expected more from his potential kidnappers, but no, he was just stuck in a dark, empty room, and -- he was stuck in an empty room, where were Dasha and Vang0, were they okay, what had happened to them, he needed to get to them, he needed to calm down so he could get to them, and -- he didn’t see or hear anyone nearby, he wasn’t any more injured than he had been the last time he was awake, his hands were free and his feet were only secured with shitty duct tape, he didn’t have any weapons on him but that was okay he could manage, he needed to get out of here, find his partners, and get the hell out of dodge before they got into any bigger trouble than they were already in. Burger’s eye-cam was thankfully still online, so he switched to infrared and thank  _ someone _ that whoever had captured them was an idiot because he could see two heat sources in the rooms on either side of his and a quick enquiry revealed that “yeah, it’s me -- Burgs, is that you? Do you know where Vang0 is?” and a kick to the wall and threat to reset their sixnite account had Vang0 confirming that they were awake and “I swear to god Burger if you do that I won’t be the big spoon for a week how dare you even joke about that” so the gang was all together and it really wouldn’t be that big of a deal to get out once someone came to check on them. 

It took a few hours, which, Burger thought someone probably should have checked on them sooner, what if one of them had managed to keep a hold of some lockpicks or something, but eventually someone was walking up to Burger’s door and opening it and saying “Oh shit he’s awake I thought Billy said they would stay down for longer” and they were reaching for their baton but Burger crossed the room in two strides and ignored the way the weapon bounced off his jaw and gave the guard a swift punch to the head and they went out like a light -- turns out inbuilt brass knuckles are good for something -- and from there it was the easiest thing in the world to snag their keys and gun and open the doors for Dasha and Vang0, and toss Dasha the gun because she was the boss, and as he checked around the corner for the next enemy, his partners at his back, Burger had to admit that, even if he still sometimes wanted to kick that creature’s face in -- seriously, _fuck_ that four hoofed bastard -- maybe the whole donkey thing had turned out for the best.


End file.
